Dave Wentzel's blog

This post isn't going to teach you the basics of Azure SQL Data Warehouse (ASQLDW). This post is going to honestly cover the strengths and weaknesses of the product and will show you the *possible* pitfalls you may encounter. Let me say upfront, ASQLDW is a *terrific* product, if you understand *exactly* what the use-cases are for the tool. This is not an ASQLDW 101 post, if I write about a concept you don't understand I assume you can find that info using a basic google search. To be clear, I have tons of experience in the MPP space...I've used Vertica for years (and I understand the costs/benefits of MPP. Most of the same "gotchas" with ASQLDW/APS are also true of Redshift, Snowflake, and Vertica. Each tool has a slightly different take on how to overcome perceived MPP shortcomings when compared to a traditional RDBMS. Do your research!

I was asked to bring my Bricklin to Boyertown Auto Museum for a segment of Motor Mouth on local cable TV. Malcolm Bricklin was the topic of the segment and I'm one of the few people in the area with a (mostly) functional Bricklin SV-1.

Want to be a "data scientist"? Don't know where to start? Try the Microsoft Professional Program in Data Science. I am a charter graduate. It's a curriculum of edX courses that really help you think differently about your software projects and business. I certainly won't be adding "Data Scientist" to my resume any time soon, but it is a good first step.

PerformanceCollector (PC) is free and open-source software (FOSS) that I developed to monitor and baseline performance of your SQL Server. There are certainly plenty of commercial tools and even free scripts available on the net that handle all of this.

I wrote a guest blog post for gitlab.com regarding how to Setup a GitLab Instance in Microsoft Azure. I'm a big user of git and gitlab puts a nice webUI on top of git, as well as a bunch of additional features. With gitlab's new images on the Azure Marketplace developers have another avenue to host their git repositories without managing a git server or using external hosting like github.